The Horse Goes VRINSK! 6 Noises Foreign Languages Suck At

Most people are familiar with onomatopoeia, if only as the word that they failed to spell in the fourth grade (and if you're a Cracked writer, you did it again just now, like eight times in a row). Onomatopoeia is the "buzz" of a bee, a "knock" on the door, or the "ZAMN!" of Batman's fist as it makes contact with a skull. And, like everything else, it's funny to laugh at how the foreigners do it all wrong.

...

What?

#6. The Sound a Horse Makes

The horse is a simple, solemn animal. In English, the horse says "Neigh." Meanwhile, in those wacky foreign countries...

Denmark - The noble horse breaks free of its pen after a raging thunderstorm. As the clouds begin to part, it rears up on its hind legs, silhouetted dramatically against the emerging sunset, and cries out in celebration of its new-found freedom: VRINSK!

...What is that, a faucet company? That is a completely alien jumble of letters. That's not a sound a horse has ever made; that's what you get when you smoke Salvia and take a turn in Scrabble. Merely pronouncing it makes one's tongue move in strange and perverted ways, like your mouth is somehow molesting itself.

#5. Eating

Listen, you can question our credentials on any of these other entries, but we here in the States eat food better than anyone else, and we know what goddamn sound it makes: munch, chomp, even the occasional om nom nom--they're all pretty good, because they all sort of sound like what you hear when you chew something (inside your head, anyway). Not like:

Hey, they live on an island: They've got no one to answer to; it must be liberating. Have you ever lived without any neighbors? You walk around naked in broad daylight, do weird things to trees and become oddly feral at night. That's Japan like, every day. For centuries. Eating is "mogu mogu" for the same reason their noise for "dozing off" ("Toro, Toro") sounds to the rest of the world like the last thing you hear before being trampled by a rampaging bull: Nobody was there to tell them that's goddamn ridiculous.

Who's down for some fish porn?

#4. Creaking Floorboards

The quintessential "killer is in your house" noise written into every horror movie and tension-filled scene. Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense himself, used the sound countless times. But what if he was from...

Germany - A darkened parlor. A woman sits, weeping quietly. The camera draws closer. She pauses, did she hear somebody or...? No, it's nothing. She stares quietly out the window. The camera draws closer, and closer again. Clearly matching the silent footsteps of a man, advancing on her in the darkness. Now she freezes, as from behind her, there sounds a soft, ominous... KNARZ!

And all the sinister undertones go right out the window. "Knarz" isn't a floorboard creak; it's the sound Jerry Lewis makes when you punch him in the chest. But it's nowhere near as bad as...

Czech Republic - Vrrzzz! That's an insect, a kazoo or an old sci-fi ray-gun. What the hell are floorboards made of in Eastern Europe? We know you're all uncivilized barbarians, but can you seriously not afford wood?